Having proved his credentials with Edge Of Darkness for the BBC, as well as episodes of 'The Professionals' and 'Minder', Martin Campbell (later to offer up The Mask of Zorro and Goldeneye) here launched into an American courtroom-psychopath drama in the tradition of Jagged Edge, Suspect and Presumed Innocent, without ever attaining the tension of such company.
The script has a few passages weighing justice against vengeance, and Oldman and Bacon play their scenes together with a nervously scary intensity that is reminiscent of Campbell's best work. The story, how ever, by Larry Kasdan's brother Mark, is nowhere like as allusive or absorbing as it should be, shooting off into all manner of unlikely melodramatic devices and too often ditching the quietly scary; character stuff for stalk-and-slash psyche scenes.